Tuesday, September 04, 2012

I’ve been
reading Jeanette Winterson’s just-published pot-boiler, The daylight gate, her take on the Pendle witches. In the first
place, it interests me just how commercially vibrant 17th century
witchcraft can be. That Pendle Forest area of Lancashire seems to have
mobilised itself to promote tourism by playing up on those associations, and if
the local tourist chiefs can keep a few tame archaeologists on their payroll,
any word on the search for Malkin Tower can always be guaranteed to make the
national news.

Heavens, I
almost was tempted to put in a bid on a portion of Roughlee Old Hall myself,
when it came on the market recently. (But think of the people with hair in
green-dyed straggles you’d get banging on your door, demanding access to the
place the latest and more debunking local historian says was not Alice Nutter’s
house at all.)

The devil
Ms Winterson has struck her commercial pact with is Hammer Films, a subsidiary
these days to ‘Exclusive media’, and ‘Exclusive media “is a vertically
integrated global filmed entertainment company”, or so their website is proud
to boast.

So, someone
at ‘Exclusive Media’ has noted the success of ‘The Woman in Black’, and had the
idea to commission classy new tales of horror and the supernatural, and their
publication can make money, and create a buzz by way of advance publicity for a
film version, which makes even more money. (This is not bad thinking, is it?)
Helen Dunmore has delivered a story about a haunted RAF greatcoat, and the
author of Oranges are not the only fruit has
gripped her own nose tightly with one hand, taken the money in the other, and
delivered her version of Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches (1848/1849 - which is great fun in its
prolix way) or Robert Neill’s Mist over
Pendle (1951 - I haven’t read it).

I imagine
Ms Winterson has some feel for the setting, as Lancashire born. I liked the
scene-setting sketch of Pendle Hill, where “hares stand like question marks”
(later the heroine sees a hare whose face seems oddly familiar to her – this
hare being James Device in transformed shape). She certainly has fun dredging
up from her memory of late Friday night horror films on TV the kind of tatty
Gothic décor Hammer Horror’s set-dressers delighted to create: “(Elizabeth
Device) was tending a cauldron coming to the boil over a dirty fire. A rough
altar, a pair of sulphurous candles and a skeleton still chained to where its
owner’s body had left it completed the furnishings of the cellar”. It must be fun
for a literary author to let rip with some oozing fibreglass prose like that.
You can almost hear the self-disbelieving giggle.

Authors who
embark on the Pendle witches seem drawn to Alice Nutter, who was central in
Ainsworth’s novel. Thomas Potts makes her participation in witchcraft (in the
1612 case) a matter of astonishment, something inexplicable:

“to attempt this woman in that sort, the Divel had small
means: For it is certain she was a rich woman; had a great estate, and children
of good hope: in the common opinion of the world, of good temper, free from
envy or malice; yet whether by the means of the rest of the Witches, or some
unfortunate occasion, she was drawn to fall to this wicked course of life, I know
not …”

The
inexplicable always draws lots of attempts to explain: a lot of surmise has
clustered about Alice. Some allege that she was the victim of a property
dispute with the magistrate Roger Nowell, or that her own family members were
so avid to inherit her estates that they did nothing to testify for her, or
otherwise sway the case in her favour in the way their status and wealth would
have made easy. Others say that she could not produce an alibi for her
purported attendance at the diabolical Good Friday feast of mutton, because she
was Catholic, and had been at a Catholic mass: she died silent to save the
priest and the congregation. My favourite local historian thinks that the
historical Alice Nutter was an elderly woman, aged 70 or more), and perhaps senile,
someone unable to plead properly.

Harrison
Ainsworth’s novel shows a tender class-based concern that the soul of the
gentlewoman witch be saved, as indeed it is, through the saintly behaviour of
her daughter. As in Ainsworth, Winterson’s Alice Nutter escapes the devil and
cheats the executioner.

But Winterson’s
Alice, unlike Ainsworth’s, is not a witch. She is, rather, someone who
possesses an “instinctive chemistry”, if you please, a literal understanding of
matter and substances which recommends her to Dr John Dee. Alice diverts from assisting
him in his ‘Great Work’ because she happens on a discovery that leads to great
commercial success: she invents magenta dye. (To object that this takes place 250
years before its historical invention is just pedantry.) Alice just happens to
be wearing her new colour in the audience at the Curtain theatre when Queen
Elizabeth, slumming it on a day free of Armadas and traitors pops in to enjoy a
show. Her Majesty sees Alice in magenta, and it’s all success from there
onwards. Alice cushions her income from chemicals with judicious property
portfolio, including lucrative ownership of a high-class brothel.

Throughout
the greater part of the book Alice, an expert materialist, is characterised by
a scepticism about witchcraft, the devil, God, and the soul. Her sustained
disbelief seems unlikely, considering she is usually at the focus of a paranormal
maelstrom. John Dee has set her up with an effective elixir of youth, and she
herself has created a magical mirror. But we are to credit her with stubborn and
rationalistic incredulity.

Alice, as
chief character, also just has to be a lesbian. Winterson compromises a little,
and makes her attractive to both sexes. Our author must have had to reflect a
little about this, for one of the ways Hammer Horror films paid their way was
by a liberal admixture of girl/girl action: think of Ingrid Pitt and her
various undead girlfriends. How could Winterson exploit this subject without
foreseeing an exploitative film? Perhaps the cheesy sleaze of ‘The vampire
lovers’ was just too strong a memory?

Alice has two loves in her life. The most important
is Elizabeth Southern (“naked she seemed like something other than, or more
than, human”). If you know Thomas Potts and the 1612 Pendle case, you know what
this means: “Elizabeth Sowtherns alias Demdike” – the central character’s adored lover and
the ghastly Old Demdike are one and the same person. Alice is shielded from ageing
by John Dee’s elixir, while Elizabeth Southern’s beauty deteriorates because of
her fateful decision to ‘take the left-hand path’.

It all hinges on an awkward passage on page 61. I single it out as it is central to our understanding
of the book. First comes the betrayal, the awful consequences of which Alice
must try to expiate. Queen Elizabeth has just seen Alice at the Curtain theatre
in her refulgent magenta gown:

“The next
day the Queen sent for me.

And that
was the beginning of my fortune and the beginning of my trials.

Elizabeth
was jealous. She was a jealous woman by nature, and she was jealous of my
success and of my money. I was at fault because I did not share everything
equally with her. As I grew wealthier I invested my money. I bought her
anything she wanted but I would not make her equal.”

This is
sketchy prose. The elision of Queen Elizabeth into her jealous Elizabeth may be
careless, or deliberate. “I would not make her equal” is not the same as ‘I
could not’, and this difference is studied, but I wonder if it isn’t a little
over-brief in its handling (in a book where phrase-making and a rapidly
impressionistic prose encourage the reader to hasten forwards to the next
sensation). Alice has succumbed to the pleasures of early modern capitalism, is
busy with her investments (her money goes into heterosexual brothels, as we
later learn), she’s absorbed in turning “gold into gold”. Elizabeth in her
jealousy, denied equality by her lover, sells her soul to the devil, right on
the very next page. After this desperate act, Elizabeth self-distances, and
goes to live in a devil-funded party mansion.

Maybe I am
just being obtuse about this, but I have to be honest and say that I don’t
think Winterson does enough to help our understanding. This is why Alice
protects the Demdikes, and is so anxious to win Elizabeth back from the devil:
she precipitated the fall. I am tempted to wonder whether Elizabeth, “an angel”
in body, isn’t an ideal of Sapphic womanhood that Alice-Jeanette has betrayed
in her tawdry commercial deal to write a novel for Hammer Horror films. The
speed with which this crucial explanation of motives goes by prompts a suspicion
that the author has seen her own allegory, and doesn’t want to spell it out.

Alice’s
other lover is Christopher Southworth. This character is dreadfully difficult
to read about without seeing some toothsome Hollywood beau, tricked out with a
shirt with dangling ties at the neck and dashing hair. Oh, and a crucifix about
his neck, for he is a seminary priest. In the original events, not far away in
Salmesbury, Grace Sowerbutts accused Jane Southworth of witchcraft at the
behest of a seminary priest known as “Thompson alias Southworth”, retaliating
for the Southworth family embracing Protestantism. Potts is obviously proud
about the exposure of this (implausible-sounding) Catholic plot and (albeit
grudging) final exoneration of Jane Southworth

The other
striking thing about Winterson’s Christopher Southworth is that he has
previously been arrested and tortured. The torture involved his castration.
When he tells Alice that “I can’t be your lover”, he doesn’t just mean because
of his vows as priest. Christopher has become a highly sympathetic man,
virtually female, certainly without the offensive part, but satisfactory
exponent of cunnilingus. His opposite in the novel is the incestuous paedophile
Tom Peeper, a character more loathsome by far than any of the witches.

Alice does once
have penetrative sex with the devil: Elizabeth leads her into this aberration.
The other interesting male who turns up in the action is Shakespeare. I felt
that the greatest male writer and the devil himself were curiously paired in
the narrative. Winterson otherwise makes Shakespeare sympathetic: wise in the
ways of the world and of the spirit, a man who has made it his business to know
everyone interesting, a Catholic sympathiser.

The torture
scenes are like the torture scenes Louis de Bernières tends to indulge in: one
becomes uneasy about what is going off in the author’s little head. I guess one
could concede that they are generic to the Hammer Horror genre that impinges so
much on the author’s imagination. Torture of women, minors before the law, was
not allowed in 17th century England, but that’s one of those things
that the magenta-coloured imagination of the author doesn’t worry let get in
the way of another description of male sadistic/sexual behaviour.

It’s a
brief work: I doubt there are 45,000 words here. Since J K Rowling, there
hardly seems much distinction any more between ‘young adult’ and ‘adult’
fiction. Winterson hasn’t wasted words: it’s a book with a film in mind. I hear
the trailer now. It will sound and look like this: cue sepulchral
over-amplified voice, punctuated by thunder claps, falcon swooshes, dungeon
doors crashing shut: “Every girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice
baptised: once in church, and once in the black pool at the foot of the hill …”.
Cue visuals, two young women laughing in bed (oh, Keira Knightly and Romola
Garai). “With Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare” – visuals, Ms Knightly flouncing
her magenta frock to senior actress as QE1 – “Alan Rickman as Dr John Dee …”,
cue visuals, spikes being driven into Keira Knightly’s spine, “in Jeanette
Winterson’s classic horror, brought to the big screen, The daylight gate.” Booms, crashes, screams of agony, a falcon’s
beak, blood pouring down white skin, etc, etc, etc.